IIS Aid

If you are using IIS 5.1 on XP and are being presented with an "Unexpected Error 0x8ffe2740 Occurred" error message when trying to start your website from the IIS Admin panel, then it is likely that you have a port conflict on your system. That's the easy part, now what do you do to track this conflict down and fix it?

Well, that actually isn't that hard either. By default IIS will try and bind itself to TCP port 80, so the first thing to do is track down which process is binding itself to this port. This could be anything from another webserver (such as Apache), or in my case Skype. To do this, open a command prompt window and type in the following;

netstat -anop TCP|find ":80 "
This will give you some details of what process is using TCP port 80, and unless you have a multihomed system you should only get one result here. The only information that you really need to be concerned about is the number that is display on the far right hand side. This is the PID (Process Identifier) which is a unique number given to a process by the system when it is initiated.

The next step is to match this PID with an actual process that you can identify. There are several ways you can do this, but probably the easiest way is to go back to your command prompt window and type this in (where the number 1234 is the PID number from the previous step);

tasklist /SVC /FI "PID eq 1234"
What this will do is associate the PID number you enter with a process name which will be displayed on the far left, and on the far right will be the name(s) of any related services.This should give you a pretty clear picture of what software is binding itself to TCP port 80, and from there it is a matter of either reconfiguring that software to use a different port number or disabling it while IIS is in use. Of course on the flip side you could always reconfigure IIS to use a different port number as well. Either way, you should now be able to take action so you can start your website from the IIS Admin panel.